Eating disorders remain disproportionately prevalent in athletic populations, yet the mechanisms driving and sustaining them are poorly understood — particularly the digital environments athletes now navigate daily. A qualitative study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders offers a rare, athlete-centered account of how social media simultaneously harms and occasionally helps those struggling with disordered eating.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 athletes and 12 members of their support networks, researchers identified four distinct patterns in how social media intersects with eating disorder onset, maintenance, and recovery. Athletes described absorbing relentless streams of body-normative and diet-culture content that intensified sport-specific pressures around weight and performance. At the same time, some participants actively leveraged social media literacy — curating feeds, muting triggering accounts, and selectively engaging with recovery communities — as a self-protective strategy. A smaller subset used their own platforms to counter diet culture narratives and reduce eating disorder stigma. Notably, the study surfaced a fourth dynamic that existing literature has largely ignored: the pressure on athletes to maintain a polished personal brand online created a distinct recovery stressor, as vulnerability and authentic struggle conflicted with image-management demands.
This research is qualitative and limited by a sample of 29 participants, meaning findings reflect lived experience rather than population-level prevalence or causation. Still, the study's value lies in its nuance. It challenges the binary framing of social media as either uniformly harmful or therapeutically neutral, instead revealing a context-dependent relationship shaped by sport culture, platform design, and individual media literacy. For sports medicine practitioners and mental health clinicians working with athletes, these findings underscore that digital environments deserve explicit attention in screening and treatment planning — not as an afterthought, but as a core feature of the recovery landscape. The personal branding pressure point, in particular, warrants further investigation in larger, prospective designs.
